on the new moon in sagittarius and co-creating (with my love)
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Before we get into today’s newsletter, a reminder that we have a new December Forecast for you at Call Your Coven, combining the modalities of numerology, astrology, and tarot to bring you practical advice for these nonsensical times.
This New Moon arrives at 9* of Sagittarius, at 1:21am EST on Sunday, December 1st. (Late-late Saturday night for West Coast folks!)
This moon is playful, curious, perhaps a little less than precise, and deeply concerned with questions of creativity and spirituality. It is, after all, co-present with Mercury, which is also retrograde. This is a time to ask questions and not expect exact answers, to explore without a destination in mind. To think about the decidedly anti-capitalist tendencies of the creative muse and Inspiration.
My fiancée and I love Sagittarius season; this energy fuels our relationship in a very particular way, and not just because we both also have Mercury in Sag. And so it is fitting, perhaps, that I tried to write about the creative energy of this lunation, and ended up writing about her, and our journey of Working Together as spiritual practitioners.
The thing about being almost-married to someone who is also a writer and also a working occult practitioner is that we are frequently asked when we are going to do something “together.” But when you’re a couple who work in overlapping fields, there is the constant question — at least to me — of keeping a boundary between the personal and professional.
My love Meg [Jones Wall, of 3am.tarot fame] is an ultra-private, introverted Scorpio; I’m a comfortable-in-the-spotlight, extraverted Capricorn who, nonetheless, has learned very valuable lessons over the years about bringing a personal relationship into professional work. Before Meg, the closest I got to having a we-are-sort-of-public-figures-in-a-very-niche-way relationship was with a butch podcast host who, after our breakup, blasted me by name as “crazy” for all of her listeners to hear and talked about burning my yet-to-be-published book. In those Golden Days of Twitter, I witnessed one too many prominent artsy/media lesbian couples get together and unceremoniously implode right there on the timeline for all to see. Making your relationship part of your brand, when you both are public-facing, was a risk I didn’t want to take.
Being with Meg is what eventually changed my mind, in more ways than one. I had never wanted to be with another writer; I thought the competition and jealousy would be too threatening. But Meg was my best friend, and we had an already-knit web of trust before adding romantic intimacy to the equation. Still, the transition was hard. We had to unlearn patterns and assumptions from previous relationships, some of which were silly, some of which were devastating. The nature of our intimacy changed over time: deepened and found new contours. We learned how to be vulnerable with each other in a whole new way. How to communicate in a whole new way. It was unexpected. It was hard. As D.W. Winnicott wrote, “It is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.” And in being found, it turns out, there is joy.
Our work has always been one of the steadiest, most constant anchors of our relationship. We are both writers; Meg is also a photographer with numerous other creative gifts and interests. We also both understand creativity to be part and parcel of spirituality; we share an animistic worldview, something arrived at years after our mutual leaving of the evangelical church we were raised in. It’s not just that we can review and edit each other’s drafts or talk through money feelings; we also can discuss the spiritual roots of those practices. Neither of us has ever been with someone who so deeply, so intimately “got” it.
Still. Over the years, I have been the one who chafed at merging our professional work. I’m the one who chafes at intimacy, period; perhaps unsurprising, given that I am a child of “no is a complete sentence” Saturn and my love is a child of “but what if this other thing!” Mercury. My independence — from my abusive ex-husband, from relationships with women who didn’t understand my creative work, from my mother’s continued desire for enmeshment — felt sacrosanct, like a fortress I had to vigilantly guard, else I’d fall into old, unhealthy patterns. And so I was the one who, early on in our relationship, told Meg, no, we aren’t going to live together and I never want to get married again and I want to keep our professional lives entirely separate. Meg, both a wildly open-minded Gemini Rising and an I-can-wait-anyone-out patient Scorpio, just said of course, my love to all of it.
It didn’t take long for me to change my mind. By the time we moved in together in 2022, we were already talking about getting married (something about me having a near-death experience and Meg being my primary caretaker for months had shifted things). And so it was that there was only one place I was still holding out: the blending of our work.
In April of this year, It became obvious that my feelings about working together had changed. When out to brunch with our mutual friend
, who was visiting from LA, Bee pitched us an idea for a podcast that would become Call Your Coven. It was such an immediate, full-body YES that it truly broke through the last vestiges of my fears. Bee, her wife Stacey, Meg, and I quickly became embroiled in each others’ lives, planning episodes, having Zoom meetings about production calendars, and also working through the occasional misunderstanding. Our ability to navigate conflict as well as to develop a shared vision really showed me that yes, maybe I could work with my partner and maybe it wouldn’t destroy our relationship or dissolve into chaos and jealousy and confusion.On August 17th of this year, Meg and I hosted our first-ever joint project — just the two of us — in an experiential workshop entitled Fill Your Cup: Tarot & Astrology for Everyday Nourishment. The success of that workshop, and the fun we had doing it, quickly snowballed into something else. We started dreaming up something bigger. Something longer. Something kind of like Fill Your Cup, and kind of like our Discords, and kind of like my Showing Up to the Work containers — but something that was, altogether, different. Something that we’ve been teasing in images on Instagram all week.
That “something different” is coming to your inboxes Sunday morning, after the New Moon is exact. Time to create a new way of being.
The thing about Sagittarius energy is that it is serious about its play, about pursuing curiosity, about having fun. This energy knows that exploratory, imaginative creative and spiritual work is essential to the work itself. Sagittarius wants to consider new ways of being and believing without being tied down to the rote rules of institutions. It is the perpetual student, but also often the one who embraces learning and exploration outside of the academy. There is a wildness here that wants to live and live big.
And so this weekend, I encourage you to spend some time journaling — or thinking — about the areas of your life where you want to cultivate play. Curiosity. Imagination.
This is the stuff of creative living.
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This is such sweetness and can't WAIT for the new project
Aww, I love all of this and it’s so very relatable.